Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Bill Nye Visits the SOFIA Telescope

Episode Date: December 20, 2010

Bill Nye Visits the SOFIA TelescopeLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill Nye's Sophia Adventure, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and I lived a dream a couple of weeks ago. Bill Nye and I made a TV show. Today you'll hear some of the audio from our visit to SOFIA, the huge infrared telescope mounted in a 747, the very plane Bill worked on when he was a Boeing engineer. Bruce Betts and I will tell you about a great Sophia-related What's Up Space Trivia Prize, and we're just about to visit with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, thanks for joining us, as always, and happy holidays. You've got another update on Akatsuki. You've told me that's the closest

approximation to a correct pronunciation that you've been able to come up with. Yeah, and unfortunately, it's not very good news on the Japanese Venus Climate Orbiter, which, of course, failed to go into orbit last week. Now they're doing some fault tree analysis. They're trying to figure out what happened with the probe. And a couple of the possible fault scenarios might mean that the engine nozzle has actually fallen off. So that would be very bad news. That would be awful, wouldn't it? Oh, my goodness.

Well, they haven't given up Oh, my goodness. Well, they haven't given up hope, judging from the cartoon that some fan put up. No, they and the Japanese public have certainly not given up hope. There's a very cute cartoon of Akatsuki saying, I'll be back. So, you know, six years, it'll be back in Venus's neighborhood. And who knows what the Japanese can pull off? They've shown that they can do amazing things with crippled spacecraft. I will wish them luck. And of course, that cartoon and your full report are in the blog. Let's look forward to some things that, as we speak, have not quite appeared yet, but might be there by the time people see this. And one of those is opportunity at this interesting crater. Yeah, there was so much happening this week. And one of the big events was that opportunity,

after many months of driving, has finally pulled up to the rim of Santa Maria Crater, which is about 100 meters in diameter. It's one of the larger craters that's investigated, and it's just spectacular. It's got this amazing rim made of this brecciated, broken up, sharp angular rock, and the topography is lovely. and the topography is lovely. And they're going to be spending through probably several weeks at the rim of Santa Maria Crater because there's the holidays coming up and the drivers get some time off. And there's also Mars Conjunction coming up when they won't be able to command the rover anyway. So they'll give it a nice long list of imaging and data-taking commands and we'll let everybody take a break for a few weeks.

In the picture that you've already put up, when it was not quite at the rim of the crater, there is what could only be. I mean, there is absolutely no question. It's the tail of a dinosaur. I know. It's pretty amazing what shapes we humans can see in rocks. But dang if it doesn't look like an alligator's tail or a dinosaur or something.

It's pretty funny. You've got one more big story that I hope we'll be talking about with Linda Spilker pretty soon on the show. But this is out at Titan. That's right. You know, people have been talking about volcanoes on Titan, ice volcanoes, for a long time because it's one possibility for how you can possibly replenish the methane that's in Titan's atmosphere. The methane should be destroyed very quickly by solar radiation,

and yet it's there, so it's got to be replenished somehow. And volcanoes are one way that you could do that, but nobody's ever convinced me anyway, with evidence for volcanoes on the surface of Titan. But this thing that they unveiled last week has really, really, I think, convinced a lot of people because the topography is so incredible. They got two overlapping radar swaths, which gives you topography. And it's got some of the highest elevations next to this really deep pit and these things that do look like flows that are a different composition from their neighbors. So, I mean, it's not a slam dunk case, but it's really by far the best possible example of a cryovolcano in the whole outer solar system.

And it's really quite amazing to look at. All right, Emily, that'll wrap it up for this week. We'll talk to you again next time. Thanks again. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lacht-Wallace, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Stay tuned. We're just a few moments away from Bill and Matt's excellent adventure in the desert. The Strategic Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, better known as SOFIA, is a 100-inch infrared telescope that has begun doing what no Earth-based telescope can do. And yet, it's not a spacecraft.

SOFIA is ingeniously mounted in the fuselage of a 747SP that used to carry passengers to exotic destinations around the world. The plane is based at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in California's high desert. When I told Planetary Society Executive Director Bill Nye we could pay it a visit, he jumped at the chance. It wasn't just the opportunity to make a video about a great new tool for science. You see, before he became the science guy, Bill was a Boeing engineer who designed critical components for the 747. And this very 747, the Clipper Lindbergh, is one he had worked on.

So a few days ago, we sat down in a conference room with Bob Meyer, the SOFIA project manager, to get some background on the effort. The initial program model was contractor-led with NASA Oversight, so it was a privatized model, and things were not going real well on that model, so the program was restructured in 2006, and the program management was turned over to NASA Dryden, and we restructured it with a government-led contractor-supported activity and divided it into two projects. So there's a science project, which is located at the Science Center at Ames, and then there's the platform project. I'm sure you know a lot of this background, but infrared allows you to see a lot of things in the universe that you can't see in the visual range.

But the problem with infrared is that it doesn't work very well on the ground because the water vapor in the atmosphere blocks a lot of it out. So we actually plotted transmission versus wavelength, and the wavelength is pretty much the infrared wavelength. Even in dry places, the water vapor soaks up too much infrared. There are spacecraft that do infrared work. There was Spitzer that actually just went into the warm mode, and then there's Herschel. But they need cryogens, specifically liquid helium, to cool the detectors in the infrared instruments, and they run out of those cryogens typically in three to four years. So you have a perfectly good piece of hardware that's up orbiting,

but it can't really do its job anymore because it ran out of cryogens. And so FIA, because it comes home every night, we can change science instruments out. We can replenish the cryogens. We can fly science instruments that instead of generally being maybe 8 to 10 years old, because of all the requirements to freeze the technology to put it in space, we can fly technology that's a few years old. It must be a fantastically difficult problem to track any object in the sky while you're flying at 600, 500 knots. It is, and actually I'll give you a visual that I use

with people. We're, I've got my quarter out here. So the telescope is stable to actually just a few arc seconds while flying. So all the aerodynamic buffeting and everything on it, and it's gyro-stabilized. So we would actually have a jitter error that would be no larger than a quarter at about four or five miles while we're flying in flight. It's pretty phenomenal. And so there's hydraulic actuators that hold it. Infrared can see through dust, but it can also see cold dust. And the reason it can see, it seems contradictory, but the reason it isn't is that in the near infrared, those wavelengths actually see through dust. So you can actually, for example, see the galactic center, which otherwise is obscured by dust. Tell us the difference between near infrared and far infrared. It's the wavelength.

Tell us the difference between near infrared and far infrared. It's the wavelength. So the near infrared is nearer to the visible wavelengths and then the mid and far infrared are further away from what we can see with our eye. So what do you call infrared? 1,000 nanometers? Got it right here. It's about 1 to about 1,000, yeah. So that's why we want to use infrared and why you really need to fly or be in a spacecraft in order to really be able to fully utilize infrared. Our goal is about 1.6 arc seconds when we get to full operational capability. The width of the moon is 30 arc minutes, and this is accurate to...

Few arc seconds. You could resolve, for example, a pretty small crater on the moon while flying at 500 knots at 41 000 feet where it's fantastically cold outside and get beautiful crystal clear images so we also in terms of operational capability we wanted to be able to fly at six hours above 41 000 and that was picked so that you're you know you're above the tropopause up and in the drier stable air and we wanted to be able to support 40 principal or guest investigator teams per year at full operational capability about a thousand science hours per year that'd be maybe matinee someday it could be yeah we needed to have global operations and one of the, and

we'll talk a little bit about why that is later, a 20-year life. And because SOFIA is large and we can carry people in it, we, and it's a good icon for kids, we wanted to promote educational opportunity, opportunities with SOFIA. So we actually are going to have an EPO section, which isn't quite finished yet, in the front of the airplane, and we'll be able to carry educators. We're going to have a goal of so many educators per year. Well, let me know if you want help with it. Okay.

That would be fantastic. So let me just see here. But let me just say, as a former Boeing employee, it's quite a testament to this hull, to this airplane. The thing is 30 years old now or more, and it's still flying beautifully. So when we go down, this is what you'll see. There's been a bulkhead added in that is a structural member, and the pressure barrier from the inside of the cabin to the cavity itself.

The cavity where the mirror is is open to the atmosphere. Does anybody know? That sounds really dangerous. Well, at least the people in this room do. That's Bob Meyer, project manager for the SOFIA infrared telescope. When we return, Bill Nye climbs aboard the SOFIA 747 for a conversation with project scientist Pam Markham. This is Planetary Radio. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here on behalf of all of us at the Planetary Society and Planetary Radio. Thanks. We're in our ninth year of this show. So thanks to all of you who join us each week as we explore the universe and do what we can to, dare I say it, change this world. Perhaps you want to join this band of planetary brothers and sisters.

I don't want you to lose control, but a gift of $50 or more will get you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. That, along with our great interviews, Emily Lakdawalla's timely and fascinating updates, Bruce and Matt's What's Up segment, and my own modest contributions to the series. So if you're of a mind, you may want to click around planetary.org slash radio, download a few past episodes and learn more about your place

in space. So once again, thanks. And everyone on the staff at the Planetary Society says, Happy Holidays! Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Bill Nye and I recently climbed aboard a heavily modified 747SP to shoot a video about SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. The plane allows SOFIA to do its work above nearly all the infrared-absorbing water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. I hope you'll visit planetary.org to watch the documentary Bill and I made about our visit. We had a blast clambering down into the telescope compartment, visiting the 747 cockpit, and meeting the terrific SOFIA team. Bill sat down in the cabin for a conversation with another key member of that team. We're at one of the instrument racks on the SOFIA airplane and I'm here with

Pam Markham, the SOFIA project scientist. And so Pam, what's your deal here? Well, we are located in the part of the plane where I think the real action occurs. The person who would sit in your seat is the telescope operator, and this person really runs the show. You know, the targets are laid out well ahead of time in the flight plan, so people know exactly where they need to be pointing in the sky at what moment, and the person in the seat that you're sitting in is the person who makes that happen. Well it's a consorted effort of course but the person in your seat would actually slew the telescope to the proper place in the sky to acquire the object. You do it with a keypad or a mouse? Yeah it's all electronically driven. To precise place in the sky.

Absolutely. And we lock on. And I tell you, the coolest thing when you're sitting here during the flight is when the telescope is actually locked on tracking on the target to watch the counterweight go back and forth. You know what's happening? The telescope's not moving. It's the airplane that's jiggling around the telescope.

How long would you sit here? Well, the telescope operator is, you know, he has to keep an eye on the telescope during the whole flight. So, you know, you might get a little break to go grab a bite to eat, but you're sitting there for the whole flight. Six hours. At least. We actually fly a little longer than six hours because you have to allow for the time to climb up to altitude and then, of course, the descent. So altogether, you're probably flying about between nine and ten hours. That's a long work day. Absolutely. But I love the office. It's a good work environment. Why did you get involved in

this program? What's different? Well, SOFIA is just going to be an incredible world-class observatory. We've started the science flights last week, really successful data that came out of the observatory. And, you know, the observatory is still, I would say, a work in progress. We haven't gotten to nominal operations yet. And the fact that we are meeting and actually beating some of our specifications for the operation of this observatory is really incredible. The images that we were able to obtain last week on several astronomical objects were extraordinary. And in fact, some of those images were the first time that object has ever been looked at at that high quality resolution at that particular wavelength.

So if I'm a regular person, I'm paying taxes, I'm walking down the street, what is SOFIA going to do for me? Okay, well, SOFIA is going to bring to you the world of infrared astronomy. It's going to give you a view of what is going on in the core that's shrouded with dust of star-forming regions. We're actually going to be able to resolve individual stars in an otherwise completely opaque area of the sky from a visible light perspective.

So the infrared allows you to literally peer down into the heart of that star forming region and actually be able to see the stars that are being formed. And that will give us insight into how our own solar system, for example, and our own star, the sun, was formed. So you're seeing where stars are born. This right away says to me, fusion. Absolutely. And in some cases, in fact, last week, we looked at a dense, cold molecular cloud. When you say cold? Almost at the, you know, absolute zero level. I mean, just, you know, maybe 10 degrees Kelvin.

So very, very cold. In this area of the sky, this particular molecular cloud that's very dense, you know, cold gas tends to clump together. That's sites where brand new stars are just beginning to form. In fact, they probably aren't even starting the fusion process yet. What you're actually seeing is gravitational clumps of material that will be stars in the next million years or so. Oh, million years. It's coming right up. That's right.

You don't really know what you're going to discover, so that's why you're looking. That's right. Well, we know enough based on the considerable groundwork that has been laid by previous infrared observatories what types of things to look at. There are still many unanswered questions about the very process, the physics involved in star formation, many unanswered questions about the very process, the physics involved in star formation, how do planetary systems evolve and end up forming things like the Earth. Where did all the water come from? I was going to say that. Where did all the water come from?

And SOFIA will actually be able to make some inroads into that question as well by looking at comets. We spoke earlier about the potential that SOFIA has for looking at comets that are really close to the sun. And that's the moment when you really want to look at comets and gather data because the gas and the dust from the comet are being evaporated most significantly at that point. And to be able to acquire data and look at the types of chemicals and elements that are in that comet, we may very well be able to ask, is the type of, there's a signature of water in that comet that we can then ask, do we see that same signature on the Earth? And can we actually be able to figure out which group of comets

that delivered the water to the Earth. And the water formed in stars too, right? The water is present. We already know this, although Sophia will provide more answers about this question as well. Water already exists, we know this, in the environments in which new stars are formed. The real question is, what role does water play in the development of planetary systems? Oh, that would be good to know, wouldn't it? Thank you very much. How cool is this?

Sophia Project scientist Pam Markham. You can hear and see much more at planetary.org. That's where you'll find the half-hour documentary Bill Nye and I made about our recent trip to California's high desert, where the SOFIA project is based. Don't worry, it's broken into nice, bite-sized segments for Internet viewing. And I hope Bill and I will get to make that return trip when educators and media will ride along

as SOFIA reveals the infrared secrets of our universe. Bruce Betts is now on the skypline. He's here to tell us all about the night sky. What's up? Stuff up in the sky. We've got Jupiter dominating the evening sky, bright star-like object in the southeast. After sunset, we have got Venus dominating the pre-dawn sky,

bright star-like object over in the east with saturn above it if you are picking this up right after it's hot off the presses on monday the 20th then remember there's a total lunar eclipse tonight with the uh partial eclipse beginning at 10 32 p.m pacific standard time if you're picking it up after that, we hope you enjoyed the totally awesome total lunar eclipse. I don't think we're going to see much of it here in Southern California where it has been raining. Only if we take a flight up in the air, I think. Yeah, God. Apparently it will rain for 40 days and 40 nights here.

Maybe we can get back out to Dryden and get the Sophia people to give us a lift. Ooh. Yeah, that'll happen. Listen, one thing, because we did hear about this from Patrick Wiggins, who thought that maybe he misheard that you said that most meteor showers come from asteroids, and I assured Patrick that you know better than that. It was a slip of the tongue.

Yeah, I didn't actually say that. I suspect that you altered the audio file to make it seem like I said that. Drat, foiled again. No, no, of course, most meteor shower sources are actually great big balls of cheese. No, they're comets, comets. Apparently, I accidentally misspoke and said asteroids, but the vast majority of them, comets. All right. We can move on.

We move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1968 that Apollo 8 launched and then went into orbit around the moon. It was 1988, 20 years later, two Soviet cosmonauts returned from space after each having been there for over a year. Wow. And then now I'm ready to move on to the next segment. Oh, and you probably want to know if you need to say random space fact. Let me save you the trouble because we have heard once again from Brandon Cook. And Brandon is the one, he's already brought us a couple of really spectacular little bits of listener-created content, I'm calling them.

So here is his introduction for Random Space Fact this week. One of Nutmeg's earliest mentions of use was in the 8th century by St. Theodore the Studite, while cinnamon was known to have been imported to Egypt as early as 2000 BC. Uh, team, what are you doing? I'm doing the segment, you know, random spice fact. Uh, team, it's not random spice fact. It's random spice fact. Oh, it is?

Uh, what are we going to do? I don't know. Maybe Dr. Bruce Pitts can help. Wow, I will try to do? I don't know. Maybe Dr. Bruce Betts can help. Wow, I will try to do my best, although it would be really cool if we had a fact about paprika instead. I think we should just do a space and cooking show. But not right now, right? Not right now. Mars Odyssey, this last week, as you may be aware, it became the longest operational spacecraft at Mars ever. And it's a

really long time. It just beat out Mars Global Surveyor's record of 3,340 days. Very, very impressive. We've got to get somebody from that team back on. Because of course, that spacecraft should be renowned not just for its longevity up there, but for some great accomplishments. Oh, it's done all sorts of great science. Still does. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. We asked you a question about an aircraft. What airplane was the airplane used to ferry the Soviet one-time use, as it turned out, Buran shuttle spacecraft.

I also asked, what was its claim to fame, of which it has many, but in particular, it's got some records that it holds. Go ahead. I will tell you that claim to fame, first of all, it is the world's heaviest fixed-wing aircraft. Now, I don't know why everybody submitted that as heaviest fixed wing.

Must be how the Wikipedia lists it, because it's probably heavier than any rotary wing aircraft as well. But it is the Antonov AN-25, also known as Mrya. I think I'm pronouncing that more or less correctly. And it has many claims to fame. It also has carried the largest cargo ever, which oddly enough was not the Buran Space Shuttle. It carried, what is it, 216,000 meals ready to eat to Iraq to resupply the Allies there. That's a lot of MREs. That is. That would last me like a week. there. That's a lot of MREs. That is. That would last me like a week. At least. But you wouldn't eat the carb part anyway. And there's only one of these beasts that they ever fully

finished and made. It has a bit part in the movie 2012, the worst science fiction movie made in history since Plan 9 from Outer Space. And we're told by John Gallant that the Decepticon character Jetstorm in the 2007 Transformer movie is based on the Antonov An-225. Oh, you probably want to know our winner. Oh, I desperately do, and I'm sure our winner wants to know, too. It was Kev Knowles.

Congratulations, Kev. Kev is in New Zealand, one of our Down Under listeners. He won out over a whole bunch of people who obviously were hoping to pick up that Beyond Earth T-shirt from ChopShopStore.com. Kev, we're going to send one your way very soon. And we have a cool prize for the new contest as well. But first, tell us, what is it you want to know from people? Well, we just had some new astronauts, cosmonauts transfer to the International Space Station. And I like people to keep track of who's up there.

So a fairly simple one. Who is on board the International Space Station right now. All six crew members go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And you want the full crew, right? Yes. Okay. You've got until the 27th, that'd be December 27th at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us this latest answer.

And what a prize. We picked this up from the generous people out at Dryden, a hardcover copy of their new book, Flights of Discovery, 60 Years of Flight Research at the Dryden Flight Research Center. It is absolutely stunningly beautiful and begins even before the X-1B. But wait, there's more. No, really? How about a SOFIA commemorative pin that actually flew on the first light flight by that telescope, 747-based telescope that we just talked about on the show and that I hope everybody's going to go and take a look at the video that Bill and I created from that visit. There you go. That's cool stuff. I'll say. In fact, I did say. Good job. All's cool stuff. I'll say. In fact, I did say. Good job.

All right, everybody. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about your favorite form of precipitation. Thank you, and good night, and happy holidays. Happy holidays to you, and to all the rest of you as well. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. For the Planetary Society, he joins us every week here for What's Up. Forgive me, just one more pitch to take a look at the documentary Bill Nye and I have produced about our visit to SOFIA, the infrared telescope in a 747.

We'll have a link that you can reach from our convenient Planetary Radio button that is always at the top left of the Planetary Society homepage, planetary.org. There may also be a link to the video under the features heading a little lower on the same page. Join us next week when we will once again check in with Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker. I'm sure she'll want to talk about that suspected ice volcano on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, and much more. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Thanks for listening. Clear skies and happy holidays. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова